Charita Goshay: Christmas is about a gift to us that can't be bought

Instead of bickering over Santa's ethnicity, perhaps our time would be put to better use if we asked ourselves how and why we've drifted so far from Christmas.

Charita Goshay CantonRep.com staff writer @cgoshayREP

Instead of bickering over Santa's ethnicity, perhaps our time would be put to better use if we asked ourselves how and why we've drifted so far from Christmas.

For those who believe, the meaning of Christmas is simply this: "Emmanuel," meaning God is with us.

It can be safely said that we've gone off-message.

There are people who are convinced that Christmas is systematically under siege from others who are anti-God and anti-religion. Vigilant against every slight, real or perceived, they're too angry to enjoy Christmas.

But the only behavior that looks remotely warlike is the brawling that occurs when retailers push open their doors on Black Friday.

Christmas has nothing to do with "gifts" as we define them. How much sense does it make that we plunge into debt in the supreme irony of celebrating of a child so poor he was born in a cave and slept in a trough?

IMMEASURABLE

Christmas is an acknowledgment, a reminder, that we are the recipients of an immeasurable, inestimable gift that can't be bought.

Christmas urges us to go and do likewise. To give to others those things that can't be bargained for: Love. Hope. Mercy.

Christmas is everything, everything, about giving. It is about a single, stunning act of selflessness — the closing of a chasm into which too many wounded souls had fallen. It's about the dispelling of a darkness that engulfed the world in despair, and the fulfillment of a long-awaited promise to begin the world again.

So, how did Christmas get to what we see now? The season's rampant and naked consumerism, and our embrace of it, threaten to bypass the good news:

"For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a savior."

A recent survey conducted by Pew Research Center and Religion News Service found that 32 percent of "nones" — people who are unaffiliated with any organized religion — still believe in the Virgin birth of Jesus, as recorded in the New Testament.

The world is waiting for those of us who say we believe in the Christmas story to act like it.

TAKERS

When non-Christians see believers up in arms over some pop-culture controversy, yet silent and passive when it comes to injustice or the plight of the poor, it tells them something.

Money talked even 2,000 years ago, so the little family from Nazareth was all but invisible to a world too busy and self-absorbed to care about their plight. There was nothing whatever to suggest that God inhabited a bundle borne by a frightened teenager and her bewildered fiancé.

You have to wonder how they would fare in our so-called enlightened age.

Pregnant, unmarried and broke? Takers.

He became like us so that we might become more like him. The transformation wasn't on his part. It's on ours.

Reach Charita at 330-580-8313.On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

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